Ian N Mills
Ian N Mills is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at Hamilton College. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Duke University in December 2020. Mills teaches courses on the history of Christianity, Judaism, and other religious groups in late antiquity with special attention to minority and/or marginalized movements. His research, consequently, explores authority, diversity, and the tensions within texts and traditions. Mills’ forthcoming monograph, The Gospel Hypothesis (Fortress Press), argues that early Christian readers drew on Hellenistic literary theory to make sense of the diverse and often contradictory biographies of Jesus available in the second century.
Mills’ current project—Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans: Text, Paratexts, and the History of a Christian Apocryphon—traces evidence for the status, use, and interpretation of the pseudo-Pauline Laodiceans in late antiquity and the middle ages through paratextual features in the Latin manuscript tradition. The variety of titles, prologues, and marginalia in medieval manuscripts of Laodiceans suggest that, in in spite of its condemnation by authorities, some Christians continued to read the apocryphal work as another Pauline epistle—while others protested. Likewise, the variety of placements of Laodiceans in Biblical manuscripts indicate tensions between putative authorities and scriptural practices.
I am grateful to receive a Research Fellowship from the University of Glasgow to continue my work on the pseudo-Pauline Epistle to the Laodiceans in Medieval Latin Bibles. This fellowship will allow me to view and produce indices for several medieval Bibles—at least one of which contains Laodiceans (as noted in an earlier catalog). I will incorporate these witnesses into my critical edition of Laodiceans and record all relevant paratexts as the primary data for my study of the continued use of this non-canonical letter throughout the middle ages. Thanks to the generous support of the University of Glasgow, my monograph will be the first to include manuscripts held at Glasgow as witnesses to this early Christian apocryphon.
